So you're coming to London next year? Wow. I hope you can find time to visit the museums. The Science Museum isn't as good as it was (they're modernised it with too many gimmicks for kids), but the Natural History Museum is as good as ever.

The British Library relocated from Bloomsbury and Holborn (for the Science Reference and Information Service library) to one big building St Pancreas a few years ago, and that's a great place to visit.

If you are staying for a postdoc near London, you can always get away to the mountains in Wales or Cumbria by train at weekends. I did mountaining climbing in the scouts at the mountains around Abergavenny in Wales twenty years ago, and there are some pretty steep hills there. I remember getting stuck and dizzy on a steep rock face, and having to be rescued. It was harder going down than up, due to seeing the drop on to hard rock. So the nearest I come now to mountain climbing is putting the treadmill on an incline at the gym.

Abergavenny is a really beautiful place, but here's a warning tale. In the scouts we camped in a field beside a forest and a stream, with mountains in the background. The stream was supposed to be pure mountain water, and we used the water for drinking for a week without boiling it. Then one day we went on a hike upstream, and just round the corner there was a dead sheep lodged between rocks in the middle of the stream! Yuck!

I hope you'll enjoy your stay in England, and you'll be a lot closer to America than you were in New Zealand. There are lots of cheap flights available to the USA from here. Let me know if you give any lectures or conference talks, please!

Wow! Thanks everyone for the enthusiastic comments! Mahndisa, I was fortunate enough to go to the Australian Opera regularly when I was younger, so I have been to a performance of Die Meistersinger. But I haven't been to the opera for many years, and am really looking forward to it. A little climbing would be an extra bonus, because I have been too busy waitressing to go lately.

Tommaso, I probably won't be there in June, unfortunately. But hopefully we can catch up another time.

"Cool cat Bill Edwards is a serious climber. He knows where to go in the London suroundings."

Then spill the beans, please if there's somewhere nearer! If there's somewhere decent to climb within an hour of London, I'd like to know. Apart from climbing walls, buildings, or walking up box hill, I'm not aware of any mountains nearby (unless they're compactified in extra spatial dimensions!). With some basic equipment (rope, harness, etc.) I think it's pretty safe. That's a bit like the difference between wearing a safety belt in a car and not doing so.